On Saturday, Ben graduates from LHS.On Sunday, James takes the train back to New York for his own graduation.And on Monday, Garen loses his fucking mind. The last bell of my junior year rings at two o’clock, and I immediately head to my locker with a trash bad. All of my textbooks have been returned; all of my papers have been turned in; everything left is trash. I dump all the paper scraps, torn book covers, and pen caps into the bag. My pictures are taken down with more care; the half-dozenshots of Ben and I – sitting together during dinner at prom, at Alex’s various parties, in his room, cooking with his little sisters – are at eye-level or higher. Below that, my entire first semester is taped up. Faye and I on a class trip. Miles and I using the jelly from a donut to draw dicks on the pastry case window at the Daily Grind for the next crew to clean up. Corey and I flipping off the camera, exhausted and sweat-soaked after a track meet. At the very bottom, below my class schedule, below a magnetic pencil cup, below a to-do whiteboard, is a shot Garen had slapped there in December. “Come on,” he had said at the time. “I’ve got some of you in my locker.” I had asked him to show me, but he had refused. Now, I drop to my knees and pluck the picture off the door. In it, Garen is propped up in my bed, shirtless, with his guitar in his hands and a lazy, sexy grin on his face. I tuck it into my backpack with the others and stand, tossing the trash into a bin at the end of the hall. Halfway to the front door, I freeze. The senior hallway is directly to my right, empty now that everyone has graduated. A sudden thought strikes me, and before I can think better of it, I am jogging off down the hall. Three twenty-four… three twenty-five… three twenty-six… Three twenty-seven. It takes me a moment to remember the combination, but eventually, I dial it in. Six, twenty-five, eleven. The door pops open, and my breath catches in my throat.I hadn’t expected it to be still full. I had assumed that sometime in mid-March, when the letter came saying that Garen had missed thirty-five days of school in a row and was therefore expelled, someone would have dumped it all. But no, it’s all still here. His textbooks – I’ll have to turn those in at the office. And his notebooks – those can be brought home. It’s the other things that shake me. A long, dark green scarf draped over one of the hooks, a stack of CDs on the top shelf, a black tote bag full of sheet music, guitar books, spare picks and strings. And the photographs.Some of them are of bands – Snow Patrol, Death Cab for Cutie, Bright Eyes, Brand New – and others are people I don’t recognize. Some of them are attractive boys in khaki pants, Oxfords, and ties, which I assume would make them old classmates from Patton. I recognize James in a few of the shots, beautiful even as a freshman, always with his arm slung around Garen’s shoulders. Garen barely looks like the same person, with his self-conscious eyes and his curly hair. Below those pictures, there’s one of his parents. It must be old, because they look happy together. After that, there’s a picture of the Testarossa, gleaming in front of a large blue house I don’t recognize. Maybe it’s the old house, in Ohio. Or his mom’s house, in New York.Below the car, there are four pictures of me. A shot taken with Bree, a few days after we met, all of us looking uncomfortable and embarrassed. Another of me, sitting at the kitchen table, my eyes focused on a textbook and my middle finger raised nonchalantly towards the camera. Then. Of course, there are the photos of us “after.” After we got together, after everything changed. No wonder he refused to let me see these months ago; I would’ve made him shred them. The first is of me sitting on his lap, possibly on the living room sofa when no one was home. I’m probably crushing him, and his arm is twisted at a strange angle to get us both in the frame. In the second photograph, I am sprawled across his bed, sleeping, with my homework surrounding me. And there, right at the bottom of the door, is one of us kissing. How is it even possible that these pictures exist? How did I, closeted and terrified, let him create such a paper trail? I snatch them all off the door and stuff them, along with the CDs and scarf, into the music bag, which I jam into my own backpack. The notebooks get dumped in the trash, and the textbooks get carted up to the main office. Outside of the school, I am only able to take a few steps towards the sidewalk before I am stopped in my tracks by the blaring of a car horn. I glance up, purely out of instinct, and there it is. Garen’s Ferrari. Which is impossible, because only Garen drives the Ferrari. And Garen is in a wheelchair.I take a couple of slow steps towards the car, and sure enough, the passenger window rolls down, and Garen leans over, grinning at me from the driver’s seat. “Need a ride?”“How are you driving? You have a broken leg,” I say, but whenI open the door, a pair of crutches is already leaning on the seat. It takes me two seconds to add the weeks in my head, and another half-second to be fucking furious. “You’re still supposed to be in the chair. The changeover isn’t supposed to happen until Friday, at the earliest.”“So I’m a few days early. It’s not a big deal. I’m actually really good on crutches. Besides, I can just work the pedals with my other foot—”“Garen, you’re crushing your leg. You can’t even use one of your hands to steer. Aren’t you in pain?” I demand. His answering smile is a little lopsided.“Nah, I’m fine.”I stuff my backpack into the backseat and storm around the car to wrench open the driver’s side door. “Are you high?”Garen rolls his eyes. “Stop being dramatic, T. I’m taking the painkillers that my doctor prescribed. Okay, so, I may have crushed them up and snorted them instead of swallowing them with juice, but it really is the thought that counts.”“Is that all you’re on?” I ask.“I’m also a little drunk.”“Are you on cocaine?”“Maybe that, too, yeah.”“Get out of the car.”He goes back to rolling his eyes, but he at least hands me the crutches and lets me help him out of the car. “What do you want now? Are we going to throw down, or just make out?”“Neither. Come on,” I say, leading him around to the passenger seat. “I’m not letting you drive like this.”He sinks obediently into the passenger seat, but smirks and says, “This is illegal, too. You don’t even have your license.”“I have my permit, and this is a better alternative. Now, can you please explain why the hell you thought it was a good idea to come pick me up while stoned and, to use your words, ‘a little drunk’?”He laughs. “Open your eyes, Travis. I’ve pretty much been high since last Thursday. High off something, anyway. It started with the painkillers, but I’m starting to run low, so I switched to blow on Saturday night. I don’t get why you’re making this into such a big deal. It’s not like I haven’t done drugs before.”“Have you been addicted before?” I ask, belting myself into the driver’s seat and slowly easing out onto the road. He ignores that, just twists to face me and slouches in a way that can’t be good for his barely-healed ribs. For several long moments, there is nothing but silence. When I roll to a halt at a stop sign, I glance sideways at him. His face is a confusing mess of pain and amusement. I open my mouth to speak again, but he cuts me off with, “Did you have a good Christmas?”“Excuse me?” I say. Fuck, he must be more high than I thought.“Last Christmas. Did you like it?” he repeats. “It was fine,” I say, trying not to remember the way he had carefully stacked his Hanukkah presents in the living room with the Christmas tree, and refused to open them until the same day everyone else was opening their own gifts. “What does that have to do with anything?”“I made out with your boyfriend on Christmas. Do you remember that? Back before you two fell in love, or whatever, before you even talked. I went over his house, and he kissed me, and I kissed back. And you forgave me for it, you stupid shit, but do you remember what you said to me after I told you what I’d done?”“That you were a douchebag, probably,” I mutter. Garen rocks forward suddenly, catching a fistful of my hair and twisting my face towards him. It hurts like fuck, and all I can see now is his tense face. Thank God I’m still at the stop sign. When he speaks next, his voice is almost a perfect imitation of mine.“‘Do you wish I could be him for you? Do you wish I’d dye my hair dark and cut it so scene so you could pretend I’m him while you’re fucking me?’”He releases me just a suddenly and sinks back against his car door. I turn back towards the room and slowly roll out through the intersection. “Is that really what I said?”“Word for word,” he replies stonily. “I have a tendency to remember the things you say. Or at least, the important things, or the scary ones. And anyway, I just think it’s funny. You were so afraid of me leaving you for Ben, or cheating on you with him, and here we are now. He’s afraid of you cheating on him with me.”I pull into the driveway, park the car, and cut the engine. “What are you afraid of?”“Nothing,” he says, throwing open the door and practically hurling himself out onto his crutches. “The only thing I was ever afraid of was losing you. I was afraid that if you stopped loving me, I’d die. And guess what, I’m still alive. Sort of. So, I have nothing left to lose. I have nothing to be afraid of.”His eyes are blank, so blank it almost hurts to look at them for too long. I toss the keys to him – he doesn’t reach for them, and they hit the ground – and head into the house, upstairs to my bedroom. A few moments later, I hear the car start up again. Fuck him. If he wants to destroy his leg, or crash into a tree, that’s his problem. It’s not my job to care anymore. The problem is, I do care. I care in the worst, most painful way, and once more, it seems like there’s only one real way to fix this horrible feeling inside me. It’s not like I can talk to anyone – Ben and Alex have gone up to New Haven for the day to check out the college Alex will be starting at in the fall. Corey’s got plans with Shelley. My family seems to be permanently absent, these days. I dig through my closet, trying once more to find the tin with my razor blades in it, but of course, it’s still missing. Since the house is empty, it’s not like there’s anyone to start an argument if I dig through other people’s stuff. I search through all of Mom’s stuff, then my sister’s. Of course, there’s a possibility that either one of them would’ve just trashed the razors if they had found them. Or that it really was Ben who stole them from me ages ago. Downstairs, I hear the front door open and slam shut, followed by the halted, uneven click of crutches on the floor. There’s also the possibility that, during one of the bipolar swings where he does care about me, Garen took them. I’m not afraid to tear his room apart. It’s messy as fuck, and he’s still going to be stuck downstairs for a while. The bloodstained mattress is gone, but there are still dark stains smeared across the carpet where he collapsed while Dave beat him. His sheet music is spread out over the floor, and his guitar is still propped against his desk. I head there first, figuring there are only two drawers anyway, which would make it the most obvious place to hide something. In the first drawer, I find a package of gummy bears, a pack of cigarettes, a silver Zippo, and an empty silver flask. In the second drawer, I find my tin of razors.What the fucking fuck? I empty both drawers onto the floor and drop down onto the carpet, staring at the contents. It… makes sense that Garen would have stolen my razors. He knows about my habit, and considering he alternates between not giving a fuck about me and wanting to marry me, it’s not exactly surprising that he would’ve stolen them during one of his more lovesick moments. My skin is still too small to hold me in, my head is too small to hold in all these thoughts. I pull off my t-shirt and flip open the tin, selecting the sharpest razor I can find. I press the blade against the skin of my bicep and dig it in. The line of blood that it leaves makes my skin buzz and my face flush. For a moment, I have to close my eyes, if only to stop myself from becoming even more light-headed. Once the sharpness of my euphoria passes, I drop the blade back into the tin and push it aside. The cigarettes are a little disturbing, even though the package is unopened. I know that Garen used to smoke, back when he was at Patton, but their presence is a reminder of a time period I like to pretend he never endured. I unscrew the cap on the flask and sniff it, but it doesn’t smell like anything, so it’s clearly been empty for a while. I kick everything, except for the gummy bears, under the bed and sprawl back across the floor. I tear open the package and eat the bears one by one, taking my time and making sure I chew each one individually, until it’s nothing by sweetness dissolved on my tongue. “Ugh, fuck,” Garen groans from downstairs. I sit up, my stomach achingly full of candy, and try to listen, but there’s no more noise. Tossing the empty package in the trash can, I head downstairs. “Garen,” I say, but there’s no reply. I head for the kitchen and lurch to a stop in the doorway. The sink is splattered with some sort of dark, red-black liquid, and now I’m certain I’m about to be sick all over the linoleum. I stumble back towards the door, hoarsely saying, “Garen, why the fuck is there some blood or some shit all over the kitchen?”The door to the den is closed, but I throw it open without knocking anyway. The guy sitting at the piano bench, however, is not Garen. For a moment, I think it’s Ben. His hair is short and dark, and the hood of his sweatshirt is pulled up, like Ben’s usually is. But then I notice that there’s a silver ring through the left side of his lip, and that’s he’s too big to be Ben. He looks bored, even from behind a pair of aviator sunglasses. “Sorry,” I say awkwardly. “Um. Do you know where Garen is?”He pushes off the hood of his sweatshirt and slips off the glasses, but it still takes me a moment to realize that this is Garen. For too many minutes, we just stare at each other. Finally, I can’t stop myself from whispering, “What the fuck did you do?”He laughs a little. “To the sink? It’s just dye. I can go wash it, if it bothers you that much.”“No, I don’t care about the sink. I meant… your hair. Your mouth.”“I wanted a change, so I dyed it black. And I still wanted a change, so I cut it off. Not all of it, just… a lot of it. Same style, I guess, just a lot shorter. And I still wanted a change, so I pierced my lip. I’m trying to psych myself up to do the other side. I once fucked a guy who had two lip rings, and they looked really cool. He said they’re called snakebites,” Garen says softly. I shake my head. “I don’t understand,” I say. “I don’t understand why you’re doing this, why you’d make yourself look like a completely different person on a fucking whim.”And thenI get it. Do you wish I could be him for you? Do you wish I’d dye my hair dark and cut it so scene so you could pretend I’m him while you’re fucking me?“I told you,” Garen says quietly, “I wanted a change.”“Garen,” I murmur. “You need to stop this. You’re scaring me.” That makes him laugh. “There’s nothing to be scared of. It’s just a stupid piercing, and a stupid haircut. I don’t get why you’re making it into such a big deal.”“Gee, I don’t know. Maybe because you’re on drugs all the time, and you’re doing horrible, stupid shit to yourself. Maybe I’m just worried about how far you’re going to take this,” I say. Then, all I can do is watch in stunned silence as he props a mirror up on the piano, grabs another silver hoop from off the keys, and, with deliberation and an almost unnerving calmness, stabs the point of it right through the right side of his lip. He doesn’t even wince this time. I watch him clean a bit of blood off his mouth, and wipe down his hands. Once he is finished, he pulls the hood back up and smiles at me. “I swear, Trav. It’s not a big deal.”I don’t even recognize him anymore, and this time, it has nothing to do with the hair or the lip rings. Previous ChapterNext Chapter